Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0 Beta 2, and concludes: "This beta may not be the end result yet, but there has definitely been a lot of progress since the last one. For the first time I have been able to stop writing about individual features within KDE 4 and start to talk about the level of integration, and general feel of the system to get an impression of how KDE 4.0 will feel like to use."

I'd like to be the first to mention that horrific taskbar lol. Yeah I know it will be changed but I felt the need to get it out of my system And what's up with the green scrollbars? Seem so out of place....anyway,keep up the good work KDE Devs

The worst (least stable, less mature) piece of KDE4 until now is exactaly Plasma, that is being developed by Aaron Seigo.

So I don't know how can we simply say he was right when Plasma wasn't able until beta2 to produce a decent replacement for kicker 2 months before the final release (before the extra two months delay). Actually I think dropping kicker without a full Plasma (including plasmoids) already in 4.0.0 was a very bad idea :-P

> The worst (least stable, less mature) piece of KDE4
> until now is exactaly Plasma

hm. and this is based on .. how much experience using kde svn?

that said, yep, lots more to do. and it will get done.

> developed by Aaron Seigo

a) that's not fair to the others involved. go look at the svn logs to see just how poorly this represents the full picture

b) it's not the only thing i have to take care of. wish it was, but it isn't.

those are more clarifying points than argumentation, but i think they are useful to bear in mind.

i'd also note that pretty much nobody else is seriously working on how to re-jig the desktop workspace of a production system in a similarly holistic manner. it's a rather interesting and difficult set of challenges and questions.

> So I don't know how can we simply say he was right
> when Plasma wasn't able until beta2 to produce a
> decent replacement for kicker 2 months before the
> final release (before the extra two months delay)

whether i'm "right" or not, fact is plasma will be there. see, people were screaming "vapor!" and "hype!" and similar stuff. now that we're delivering we get called to the carpet for not delivering faster ("you only made beta2!"). seriously, wtf =)

i'm actually chuckling out loud right now because it's quite funny. a bit absurd, but also funny. maybe the two are the same thing.

oh well .. we're still working away on it regardless of the peanut gallery =)

> Actually I think dropping kicker without a full
> Plasma (including plasmoids) already in 4.0.0 was
> a very bad idea

i'm actually chuckling out loud right now because it's quite funny. a bit absurd, but also funny. maybe the two are the same thing.

Well, KDE4 is an ambitious project, and for a long period now, it was extremely difficult for casual observers to get a coherent idea of what KDE4 actually entails. It wasn't until ~10 months ago that the KDE community finally stepped up with articles, interviews, and alpha/beta releases showing to us casual observers what KDE4 is all about.

The 'mystery' surrounding KDE4 before that time led to a wild-growth of rumors, (fake) mockups, blog posts, and so on - and nobody really knew what it was all about. A lot of KDE people said it was going to be great, but had little to actually show that greatness. That can definitely be seen as an error on KDE's end, and could be something to learn from whenever the time comes for KDE5.

Those times are, luckily, far behind us now, and the betas and screencasts littered on Planet KDE are finally showing the real deal behind KDE4 and all the hard work you guys have put into it. Now let's hope that KDE 4.0 won't be too far away from KDE4 .

A lot of KDE people said it was going to be great, but had little to actually show that greatness.

That's because when one builds a house you begin with the foundation. Not a lot see, but damn important for the rest of the house.

That can definitely be seen as an error on KDE's end, and could be something to learn from whenever the time comes for KDE5.

The devs kept saying again and again and again that they were coding low-level stuff and that there was little to see at that stage. But "some" people just don't want to understand that. I don't think the KDE-devs (or the community) can do it any better than they have already done. "Some" people just don't want to understand.

>whether i'm "right" or not, fact is plasma will be >there. see, people were screaming "vapor!" and "hype!" >and similar stuff. now that we're delivering we get >called to the carpet for not delivering faster ("you >only made beta2!"). seriously, wtf =)

It's actually the same thing, vapor isn't nothing you see, but water in the gas form. So, right now plasma exists, but is still a lot of gas

And yes, I do belive it have future and it will be great, but it needs more time... much more than KDE 4.0.X cycle.

I remember your speech in FISL (Porto Alegre) last year very well, and THAT was about changing the whole KDE interface, Plasma (t.o.d.a.y) isn't

>and now you're posting from the future?
I was refering the decision that was taken much earlier than Plasma had made the first Plasmoid, sorry if my english is as good as yours

with the KDE interface, he was talking about the desktop... Of course, other things in the interface might change considerably after 4.0 as well, but plasma aims to define a lot of how you interact with your pc (unlike the current desktop).

We're not there yet, sure. But the foundations are mostly there now, and with all the other technologies like solid and akonadi, I think we CAN do more visible and bigger changes to the interface.

It's just that the nature of FOSS development makes it hard to see big changes because you get em fed them in pieces

I don't want to start a war now or something else negative.
It's constructive criticism: It's really ugly. The "save file" dialog is a lot too big and for my purposes definitively overloaded (hey it's just saving a file).

In the dophin window 40% of the space is used by buttons. Look at the OS X Finder, same functionality but less space for the buttons.

I think the visual style has to be improved a lot before the final release.

I agree. What tends to happen with large open source projects such as KDE is that someone has a good idea, and then someone else says "nice, but what about this feature?" Dozens more people contribute their own ideas and pretty soon what started out simple has grown complex. A load/save dialog should do one thing and one thing very well: load and save files. It shouldn't be overburdened with lots of extra features or frills. The same should hold true for all the other elements of KDE which serve specific purposes. When one starts throwing everything but the kitchen sink, then the entire project becomes too big and bloated to be useful. The KDE developers should study the Mac OS-X very well as this is an area where Apple programmers excel. Just my $0.02.

One of the things I always disliked in Linux/Unix UI is that you can't adjust spacings and marginx. You know, in windows 95 you could change the window title bar to being very thin, the same goes for buttons.

Every new style I see people proposing is fatter, more spacing wasted and more margins. This new theme is a nice idea, but needs do adjusts sizes (way to big for now) and contrast.

But I really don't care, how many KDE users acctually use the default style that comes with KDE? I sure don't

Konqueror, is the best, most usefull and most customizable application that I ever seen.look at it, universal document viewing (KParts), tabbed browsing, splitting pages and using KIO Slaves of KDE, You could even tell it which toolbars show which buttons where you want, on specified document type...+ ServiceMenu's and lots of others.
If you do not like Konqueror, it doesnt means that it is not usefull.you just do not like it...

A load/save dialog should do one thing and one thing very well: load and save files. It shouldn't be overburdened with lots of extra features or frills.

Loading and saving files entails navigating to the directory the file resides (or will reside). With that in mind, the only things I might call "frills" are the encoding selector and the bottom checkbox. And maybe the Options button.

Loading and saving files entails navigating to the directory the file resides (or will reside).

Bingo. And once you're there, it also might entail creating a directory, or renaming a file, or changing view modes so you can see details or thumbnails. Really a save dialog is like a little file manager. I don't see many superfluous features there either. The encoding dropdown is very useful for anyone writing in another language. The checkbox could be lost, but that's about it.

I thought the KDE 3.5 save dialog was perfect. The KDE4 dialog is thus pretty close as well, though I really hate replacing the address bar with breadcrumbs (that what it's called?). An address bar one can type in enables one to do stuff like "locate: mp3" to use the locate ioslave to display all folders on all drives whose name includes "mp3".

What does the breadcrumb bar allow? Clicking on a parent directory? That's what the "up" button is for. Removing the ability to type in the directory one wishes to save to, and replacing it with a new clutter of buttons (one for each level of the directory tree) looks naff and brings no great advantage I can see (though others may).

It allows you to click on any of the parent directories, which then open into a dropdown list of that folder and you can enter another subfolder directly. I'm not sure if I'll like it or not, it will definitely take some getting used to.

>> I thought the KDE 3.5 save dialog was perfect. The KDE4 dialog is thus pretty close as well, though I really hate replacing the address bar with breadcrumbs (that what it's called?). An address bar one can type in enables one to do stuff like "locate: mp3" to use the locate ioslave to display all folders on all drives whose name includes "mp3".

The breadcrumb itself doesn't allow to type say "locate: mp3", however, if it is anything like Windows Vista's and Gnome's/Nautilus' there will be a there will be a button you can click on to change it into an address bar.

>> What does the breadcrumb bar allow? Clicking on a parent directory? That's what the "up" button is for. Removing the ability to type in the directory one wishes to save to, and replacing it with a new clutter of buttons (one for each level of the directory tree) looks naff and brings no great advantage I can see (though others may).

The advantage of a bread crumb is that you can navigate a complex tree quickly without needing to take your hand off the mouse - much like a tree view, but more concise. You can navigate up a number of branches up the tree in one click - additionally the crumbs often have dropdowns so you can choose an any sub-directory of any parent directory in two clicks.

In OS X, File system are handled by the operating system or Fuse, so if you want sshfs, Finder doesn't care. That also means apps don't have to be written using special libraries to get at those files (i.e. i can't save a download from Firefox to a kioslave, but Firefox has no problem saving to a FS recognized by the OS).

Finder also provides previews for everything under the sun, take a look at column view.

For split views here's a hint: open another Finder window. When you "join" two finder windows (i.e. closing one of them), there's no confusion as to what will happen.

i think the point the OP was trying to make, however is that in many cases, dolphin wastes a lot of screen real estate. In this image: http://enzosworld.gmxhome.de/temp/dolphin1.png, for example, nearly half the window is taken up by buttons, toolbars, status, and menu, not leaving much room for what you're actually doing: viewing and managing files! To top that off, about a quarter of the window serves absolutely no purpose - it completely dead space (right side of the menu, toolbar, and breadcrumb, middle of the status bar).

A lot of people have problems with Finder, but I don't see what all the fuss about dolphin is. But then again, for my money: Spatial Finder/Nautilus with no toolbars FTW!

1) how, pray tell, do I enter the URI for fish in the finder (or sftp, or, imap)?

2) yes, but inline, where it actually serves a purpose? Have you ever tried to find an image in the finder, amongst hundred of others?

3) there is such thing as KIO-FUSE, you know, if you are into this sort of things

4) I don't _want_ to open another window. If I wanted to, I would have done that. BTW, has Aqua got magnetic windows, finally, or is it yet another failure of the dismal thing that serves as a WM under OSX?

5) Spacial is unfortunately the default in dolphin. Thank goodness one can still have global settings.

I really wish people stopped thinking OSX is the be-all end all of usability. It is not. Not by a long shot if you actually know anything about computers. And I don't want _any_ power removed from my DE for the sake of being more "friendly".

Usability, yes, but not at the cost of power.

4) The icons... This is all configurable, and as it happens, it was found to be more usable that way. Personally, I tend to use smaller icons and no text, but something has to be said about discoverability

I'm sorry, my friend, but if being able to tweak stuff in your desktop is your notion of a "powerful desktop environment", then pretty much all open source software is equally powerful since they all provide you the source to change every single thing you want. In that regard, GNOME is as powerful as KDE.

You will probably say that "oh, but tinkering with source code isn't power, it's having all that stuff exposed in the User Interface". Well, then you have quite a peculiar concept of power.

My concept of a powerful desktop environment is one that doesn't get in the way of me doing whatever I want: watching a movie, listening to some music, writing a document, browsing porn. The desktop environment itself is a mean to an end, not the end itself. The ability to adjust the icon size by two pixels, or the toolbar height, and so on, is complete non-sense.

Everything that isn't directly related to the tasks I usually perform within the desktop environment are settings that shouldn't be exposed in any conventional way, just so they don't take up unnecessary space when I'm looking for the settings that do matter.

Without taking away any credit from our beloved desktop developers, I'd like to say that the latency in developing a killer desktop environment is mostly because the developers themselves forget what is their true goal: to deliver a consistent user experience which empowers users to do what they want - write a piece of code, watch a movie, browse their collection of photos.

Spending time overengineering useless desktop components that, in no way, improve my experience within the desktop environment is pointless. In such aspect, there are some features that actually give more power to the users, by enabling them to do more in less time: stuff like metafolders, exposÚ, beagle, tabbed browsing, ribbon widgets, typing completion, zeroconf, and so on.

In sum, I think you're wrong because, in my opinion, a successful desktop environment is the one that forces me to spend less time tweaking it. Sane defaults, understanding the context of my utilization, helping me do the stuff I want - those should be the goals, and that is my concept of powerful.

"I'm sorry, my friend, but if being able to tweak stuff in your desktop is your notion of a "powerful desktop environment", then pretty much all open source software is equally powerful since they all provide you the source to change every single thing you want. In that regard, GNOME is as powerful as KDE."

Oh come on now. The, "You have the source so configurable options are redundant." pretty much excludes the vast and overwhelming preponderance of the user-base from making changes. Sane defaults, with a comprehensible interface that doesn't interfere with workflow, are important-- but the "You have the source so you don't need options" is just plain wrong.

I can pop the hood of my car. That doesn't necessarily mean that I can do much more than top off the wiper fluid. I can build GNOME (that puts me ahead of a lot of even skilled users), that doesn't I can add options in any sensible time frame.

1) again, the problem is partitioned differently, volumes are handled by the OS (or a kernel extension in the case of Fuse). you don't enter it into Finder (though some protocols, ftp, afp, smb, are supported in Finder, finder just passes them on to mount), you use a tool for mounting volumes. I know this isn't part of the OS, but MacFuse/MacFusion make this a non-event. And when any volume is mounted, I can open a file with fopen().

3) KIO-Fuse has nothing to do with Dolphin, but puts FS operations where they belong, at the OS layer.

4) You'd rather be confused by opening a split window and then gambling on which one will close when you click Join. Again, what does magnetic windows have to do with Dolphin, or are you just trying to flame? (Magnetic windows, FTW).

5) If you can hide the menu bar and breadcrumbs easily, Dolphin seems like it would be a great spacial file manager.

I didn't say anything about usability, in fact, it was mostly about style. I'm just saying Finder isn't wasting space like the Dolphin screenshots I've seen.

I also feel like the separation of volume management and application libraries means that applications written outside of that application framework (non-kde, non-Cocoa/Carbon) can still get to files using ubiquitous system calls.

What power is lost with that? You're using small tools designed with a specific purpose. Isn't that the UNIX ideology? Not kitchen sink tools which do everything. That sounds more like Microsoft (why is explorer a file browser, web browser, desktop and taskbar?).

6) Glad you can hide them. I'd probably use the keyboard shortcuts anyway.

That is also my take on konqueror, for something started in the linux world it seem they didn't take the philosophy to heart. It has everything that I don't need, want, care about in file browser and very little I need in a web browser. That is why I'm placing my hopes in Dolphin, but that is getting all the kparts too, which means that by version 4.2 of KDE it will most likely look like konqueror without a web browser and that is not good imo.

I do have to say that Windows hasn't had explorer and internet explorer be the same process in a while. Vista definitely dropped that and I haven't really seem that functionality since version 5 of IE. I don't use windows except at work all that much so I might be wrong.

I do think that the icons are way to big in both Dolphin and the open/save dialog. The problem is that this plays into the complaint about KDE looking toyish inthe lst series. More muted and smaller icons would have made the statement without shouting at a user. I hate to keep comapring it to Gnome and OSX but its hard because in-terms of aesthetics if not usability they are the ones I happen to liek the most. I am a gnome user and a OSX user, I'm not saying KDe should be exactly like either, what I'm saying is that maybe its time the KDE art team sat back and looked around, maybe they will see why the other alternatives are so popular and can maybe take some of the good things and leave the bad behind from these other projects. They need something more inviting and warm to to attract users.

In this image: http://enzosworld.gmxhome.de/temp/dolphin1.png, for example, nearly half the window is taken up by buttons, toolbars, status, and menu, not leaving much room for what you're actually doing: viewing and managing files! To top that off, about a quarter of the window serves absolutely no purpose - it completely dead space (right side of the menu, toolbar, and breadcrumb, middle of the status bar).

Your "half the window" claim is misleading for a number of reasons.

1. That window was obviously resized shorter before screenshotting, to save filesize. Having more than two visible rows in the viewing area doesn't show you anything new when the point is to exhibit the program's appearance. OTOH, in normal usage the window would be taller, with all the gains going to viewing space.

2. The icons have text labels enabled for clarity, which of course takes more space. Those can be disabled.

3. All the "completely dead spaces" you list either exist in most programs (right side of menu, toolbar, status bar), or are easily filled during regular use (breadcrumb, middle of the status bar). Also, look up "negative space" in regards to art/design.

How can you say what you just said and put at the end "keep up the good work KDE Devs", from your comments it's obviously not good work.

Well for one I'm really referring to the underlaying changes as that's what been done mostly and kde devs are doing a superb job with that. Also, this is just another beta and not the finished product but it has improved a lot since the previous beta.

> I'm really referring to the underlaying changes as
> that's what been done mostly and kde devs are doing
> a superb job with that. Also, this is just another
> beta and not the finished product but it has
> improved a lot since the previous beta.

++agreed;

i'm really happy with and proud of all the kde devs with the progress and pinache that's going into these releases.

and yeah, the current taskbar is not pretty. but it's hella better than it was jut 2 weeks ago. rate of change is what tends to count in these things.

in addition to fixating on bits like plasma, i really encourage people to take a look at marble, okular, dolphin, kdegames, kalzium, ...... so many good apps right now in kde 4.0. it's a bit of a shame that we spend more time on a few specific bits over and over here. the other apps (and their developers) deserve some face time with you and your computer too =)

Sorry, somehow off-topic, but:
Does anybody know if there'll be a way to disable removable toolbars in KDE4? And remove the handles as well, without having to use a QT Style that does it/has the option?
I know, I'm pretty anal about that, but I absolutely can't stand them. Imo, it very much feels like the interface is going to fall apart if I nudge it at the wrong place.

Or much better, is there already a way in KDE3 I just haven't found yet? Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Yes, strange are the reasons that drive people from KDE to other DE's but that definitely was one of them. The other main one becomes void if Dolphin will become what I hope!

THAT is beautiful. I love that. But wait, I still want a normal taskbar a-la Windows/Gnome/KDE1-2-3. I'm not a big fan of the "Dock" concept. It's just too "big" for what it does. A tiny full-length taskbar owns!

as long as they don't force it on me... For me a computer is still more like a hammer than a piece of art.
Every dock, bar or desklet I ever tried that wasn't like good old win95 taskbar or blackbox root menu simply was an annoyance for me, from a usability point of view.

I can see why artists come up with such things (and why MacOSX is so popular amongst that folk), since it really aesthetical pleasin, but I wish the usability will always be a more important issue in desktop development. And that doesn't mean it has to be ugly.

one of the great things about KDE and its flexibility is that:
KDE, could look like Gnome, could look like osx, could look like vista, xp, 95 or a mix of them, mix of good things on everyone of these.and yeah, KDE could be itself...
I mean KDE's customizability is WHAT makes it soo powerfull.

this is just the distro's job to bring the best configurations with their packages.the job that they never did.KDE (3.x) comes with Plain configuration set.none of the distro's are touching it to make it shiny...
for example look at Kopete, its really cool and functional and (at least I think) better than any other IM client, but its bad default configurations make it fall behind Gaim, and yes, distro's are not touching it, brining a nice default chat window screen, enabling some stuff, activating a few plugins)

and configurations of whole applications in a Distro, is what makes difference between distro's.the distro with best configurtaions, will rise...